A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (5 page)

The watchman was looking at the way Jayojit was standing and talking to his son. A servant passed by and then a car hesitated by the gate; the watchman got up, distracted, like a traveller in a departure lounge who realizes, after an unspecified interval, that his name’s being announced.

This space between the steps into the building and the main gates to the lane was where the sun beat down intensely. But clouds would be conjured up in the sky from nothing. On their second afternoon out, one or two big drops had dashed against the ground, becoming dark spots where they’d fallen on the driveway.

As they were looking up at the building, a dog in one of the first-floor balconies began to bark. It was an Alsatian; it seemed furious at being confined inside the flat.

“It’s a dog, baba,” Bonny informed his father.

Jayojit, tall, one part of him comparing this heat to the drier heat of the American South, wondered why people who lived in flats hardly big enough for a medium-sized family should keep dogs. This dog barked to the shadows in the outside world from the eternal but cluttered present of the balcony, amidst pots, a clothesline, and two plastic chairs like dwarves in the background.

“Hi!” The small voice was drowned by a fresh fit of loud barking.

“It’s a nice-looking dog, Bonny, but it doesn’t seem to be in a very good mood.”

There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims. Some drivers were asleep inside Ambassadors; others were crowded together outside, handkerchiefs spread, playing cards. Near the gates, in the blue shadow not of the building but of a wall behind, there were two ramshackle structures: a tea stall, which catered, with thick slices of bread and biscuits, to the drivers, and a dhobi’s shop, where clothes from the building were ironed.

When Jayojit couldn’t sleep the first few nights, he’d reread the morning’s
Statesman
, the headlines become strange at the end of the day, when the appositeness that news had in the morning—calamities and predictions—had already passed into its daily afterlife.

There was one he’d been fooled by, an advertisement pretending to be a report, with the headline “Miraculous Antidote to Hair Loss Announced,” which he began to read with the same unquestioning acceptance with which he read the rest of the newspaper, before he came to its end and realized what it was. It began: “It was announced today that finally . . .” and had just the right mixture of breathlessness and objectivity. Very clever, thought Jayojit. After this, he folded the paper, switched off the lamp, and tried to sleep.

Waking at home, in his house in Claremont, used to be difficult, with Bonny gone, withheld from him like a promise, and Amala, his wife, gone. Some of the pictures she had bought—prints; pichwais with serene trains of elephants, the cowherd-god, dallying with the gopis, identified by the peacock-plume above the forehead—were still on the walls. Mornings were quiet in Claremont; it was as if they waited till radio alarm clocks began to play and people got up. He lay still before he rose in his house in Claremont, feeling quite separate from the man who’d written a book about economic development, who drove a Ford, who’d secured tenure.

THE LUCHIS continued to appear. If his mother had lived in the nineteenth century, she, in spite of her pale complexion and occasional fatigued look, would have been happiest and busiest in the kitchen; alone and happy, not involved in the changes disturbing history and coming over others”, anonymous lives.

“Ma, this has got to stop!”

“Joy, you will not get luchis over there.”

His mother had fixed ideas about what his life “over there” was like. She had never been abroad; it was an imaginary place for her, a territory that intersected with her life without ever actually touching it, and which had, for her, its own recognizable characteristics. Two years ago, she might have gone there for the first time, if they hadn’t had to abandon their trip quite abruptly. Now her bangles shook as she put two luchis on Jayojit’s plate. Bonny, sitting next to Jayojit, was having milk and cornflakes. His father was having, as he did from whenever it was Jayojit’s memory could stretch back to, a soft-boiled egg and dry toast. That toast had been subject to vicissitude, once it was lightly buttered, and sometimes covered with a skin of Kissan marmalade, freckled with orange rind; this had been the taste of breakfast, in war and in peace.

“But, baba,” Bonny said very gravely, “you can have cornflakes if you don’t want
lu-chis
.”

From ten o’clock to eleven, for the first ten days or so, Jayojit lay down full-length upon the sofa, his legs arched slightly, his hands holding the newspaper over almost one half of his body. In front of Jayojit’s reclining figure, in the verandah, had appeared a new set of clothes drying on the clothesline— Bonny’s and his—almost crisp with the heat from the morning, hanging indecisively.

“But you must not take out the little boy”—“
bachcha
chhele
” was how she referred to her grandson—“in the sun. How will he take it? And suddenly if he falls ill?” said Jayojit’s mother, agitated and having lapsed, without warning, into a worked-upness.

Jayojit dismissed this cursorily, his eyes still upon newsprint, eking out the fantasy of a holiday and saying casually to his mother:

“Oh, he’ll be okay, ma. Don’t fuss. He’s tough.”

Bonny overheard this with the air of a passer-by whose route had intersected, briefly, the conversation of strangers. He had gone, as usual, to the verandah, where his own blue drying shirt dangled over him indeterminately.

“Okay,” managed Jayojit after ten minutes, as if he’d drifted into a coma in the meanwhile. “Okay. You have a point. I’ll take care he doesn’t get too much exposure.”

Someone was not present, and part of the conversation, of the concern, was directed at that absent figure, or at least took her into account. She—Jayojit’s ex-wife; Bonny’s mother—was more and more real in her separate, everyday existence. Yet Bonny’s grandmother was too full of her own worry, her bosom working with affection, to think of this. She gazed at Bonny with the intensity of one who hadn’t seen him enough.

SOMETIMES, in the afternoon, Jayojit came out and stood in the corridor outside the flat, taking in the breeze. He wasn’t wholly comfortable; a door stared at him from the left-hand corner. Yet the flat was hotter than it should be, because it faced the west, while the corridor received the breeze coming from the south-east.

“That’s better,” said Jayojit. From here he got a partial view of the back of the building. Facing him were the many windows and verandahs at the rear of the flats, the dark, recurring backs of air-conditioners protruding outward; and, when he turned his head to the left, he could see part of a cricket field that belonged to a well-known club. He turned and, still standing there, faced their neighbour’s flat; the nameplate on the door simply said “Ghosh.” The man, whom Jayojit had seen no more than a couple of times, apparently ran some kind of small business in timber, and was often away in the hilly, presently strife-torn area of Assam (and yet how lovely and green and misty Assam had been when he’d gone visiting relatives with parents once as a boy); and his thin grey-haired wife, Jayojit’s mother had said, was called Pramila. Relations with the Chatterjees were cordial, if minimal. In all kinds of ways, these people were a million miles away from Jayojit’s parents and their world; their ambitions were different, their friends and referents were different, even the Bengali they spoke was different; they might have belonged to different countries. The lack of contact was also perhaps partly Jayojit’s family’s fault. For, since the divorce, the Admiral and his wife had withdrawn into themselves and gone into a sort of mourning; their flat had become a shell, and the neighbours’ flat, in their imagination, had moved further away. And yet, during that great leveller, the Durga Puja, Jayojit’s mother apparently met Mr. and Mrs. Ghosh downstairs at the festivities, became part of a crowd where all disparity and private, secluding grief were temporarily suspended, and were even delighted to “bump into” each other and exchange meaningless small talk during the three-day-long ceremonies. Each year it provided a brief but vivid illusion of life beginning again, to which everyone succumbed. What Jayojit could see now, as he stood here, was the back door to the Ghoshes’ kitchen, a door with criss-cross netting through which part of a crate and a bench were visible. It was true that they weren’t socially compatible, that before the Admiral’s retirement their chances of meeting would have been remote, the Admiral with his command belonging to a different world altogether; but this country had a way of, in the end, concealing disparity and banishing the past.

“Careful, don’t hit the door,” said Jayojit as Bonny began to play on that side of the corridor. His son looked up at him and continued to improvise his little game.

Jayojit could feel now, after two and a half weeks, that he was putting on weight. A suspicion found its way to his head which he’d never harboured before: had his father become so bulky because his mother had overfed him during his working life? He’d always assumed that his father, at some point in his life, had inadvertently eaten too much; but now he wondered if his mother had deliberately played a part. As for Bonny, he, with Jayojit’s approval, had moved, by the end of the first week, to the breakfasts he was used to having; cereal (a box of Champion Oats had been procured, when they’d been convinced these were no longer available, by the Admiral, with both perseverance and faith, from New Market), a glass of milk, fruit juice—the consoling and rare sweet lime, one of which yielded only a quarter glass of juice and for whose taste Bonny had no appreciation at all; though his grandmother kept trying to tempt him towards the luchis, cajoling and pleading with him.

“Don’t force him, ma,” said Jayojit with an indulgent sternness. “Don’t spoil him—he’s not used to oily meals of this kind in the mornings.”

She listened to him, abashed, as if
he
were her mother. In America he’d imbibed clear ideas, while having no idea that he had, of what to eat and what not to. Jayojit also wanted to spare her from preparing these breakfasts—she seemed to have a dogged capacity, even at this age, for working in the heat—but feeding her own son, really, seemed to give her pleasure at a time when hardly anything mattered to her. She would come out from the kitchen, her sari tightly wound around her, her face flushed. Although she appeared so submissive, there was a streak of obstinacy in her—both Jayojit and his father knew this. She would never make clear what conclusions she had reached emotionally, and, in everything, would cannily refer to the Admiral, either repeating what he said, or saying, “Ask him.”

By eight-thirty, when they had breakfast, the dining and sitting rooms would be hot; it was a miracle they could sit and eat here every day, registering no discomfort except a few loud exclamations about the heat. Dawn would end at half-past five, and the day had had ample time to become hot by eight-thirty.

Two weeks on, Jayojit explained to his mother, “From tomorrow, I’m going to have toast and tea—no more!” For he could feel the shape of his body changing; and he was afraid of triglycerides showing up in his bloodstream, as they had in some of his friends.

“O ma—what’s this!” she said in surprise. “But you don’t even eat much for lunch! You must at least have one proper meal a day.”

“Ma, I’ve been eating better than I have for months—” and he meant it.

For two weeks he’d done little but read newspapers, and desired, in secret, to finish a book, until he sat before his laptop in the afternoon, with the chiks in the balcony more than three-quarters of the way down to keep out the heat. The chiks moved lightly, as if someone had just pushed them.

The screen lighted up; he browsed slowly through old files, his mind elsewhere. Every time he’d tried to return to, during the last two months, the project he was supposed to be working on, he found himself trying to escape it like a boy in a classroom drawn to looking out of a window during a lesson.

Before him, on the wall, there was a batik print of Ganesh that served the dual, not incompatible, purpose of being a decoration and bringing good fortune to the house. Beneath it, there was a table covered with a Rajasthani cloth with mirrorwork upon it. Each circle of glass reflected some bit of the room, no longer recognizable, independent of whatever it was it represented. These things had been bought on an impulse long ago—but the print was fairly recent— and had not so much to do with serious thought or judgement as trespassing into emporia and feeling heartless about leaving empty-handed. Then there was a Kashmiri shikara, slightly removed from its place, which is how Maya sometimes left things after she’d dusted them.

On the table there were photographs: one of Jayojit at the age of nineteen, become thin and tall (he had been pudgy as a boy), wearing thick black-framed spectacles, which were fashionable in those days; he was then at the Hindu College. Another of Jayojit and his brother Ranajit when they were thirteen and ten respectively, taken on a holiday in Madhya Pradesh, both the boys, in their long pants and keds, looking like colonizers on that ancient terrain; a wedding photo, bright with colour, of Ranajit and his wife. There were other smaller photographs, of cousins and relatives, and a series of pictures, in a large frame, of Bonny at different stages of his life; as a baby, as a child of two, when his hair, mysteriously, had been curlier than it was now, a boy of four in trousers with braces. The wedding pictures had disappeared, or become oddly improper. The pictures of Bonny were sans parents, as if he’d been conceived in a future when parents were not only no longer necessary, but were no more possible.